Professor's Drawings Featured In Book

January 16, 1986|The Morning Call

The drawings of Ed Kerns, associate professor and head of the Lafayette College art department, are featured in "Tracks in the Straw: Tales Spun from the Manger," a collection of more than a dozen stories centered around the birth of Christ.

Kerns is internationally known as an abstract painter. His paintings have been exhibited in 15 one-man shows in New York, Paris, London and other cities.

Written by Rev. Ted Loder, the stories are told from a variety of perspectives: the midwife attending the birth, the stable hand, a tent bearer who traveled with the wise men, even a goat who also found shelter in the stable that night. The tracks follows steps in time into the present with tales of a gift of forgiveness between a poor, black woman and a minister, and a gift of acceptance from a garbage collector to a suicidal woman.

Loder is senior minister of Philadelphia's First United Methodist Church of Germantown. He is well known for encouraging people to think about theological questions in individual and human forms. His church is involved in inner city ministry, including retraining the unemployed, and supports the sanctuary movement assisting political refugees from Central and South America.

"God is present with us, loving, working, nuzzling us here and now, but without making obvious ripples," writes Loder in his ep- ilogue, "God leaves tracks in the straw, but they are faint--faint, but there for those who will discern."

Kerns said, "I wanted to illustrate Loder's book because I admire his courage and living theology."

He continued, "Both religion and art search for underlying structures of life. My illustrations use simultaneous imagery and are incomplete so the viewer can connect with them. The reader is not just given an image, but can find his own way into the illustration."

Kerns discussed one of the illustrations, "One story is told from the perspective of the donkey that carried the Virgin Mary. He complains how heavy she is because she's pregnant. I made the line of his back round to indicate her pregnancy and drew another line so that the roundness could also be interpreted as another donkey head."

"Tracks in the Straw," recently published by LuraMedia, is Kerns' and Loder's second collaboration. The first, "Guerrillas of Grace," is a book of poetry also published by LuraMedia.

"Tracks in the Straw" is available locally in the Lafayette College Store, located in the basement of South College.